LEAVE IT TO PSMITH (12)
By:
March 19, 2019
Leave It to Psmith (1923) is the last and most rewarding of four novels featuring the dandy, wit, and would-be adventurer Ronald Eustace Psmith, one of P.G. Wodehouse‘s most popular characters. (“One can date exactly,” Evelyn Waugh claimed, in reference to Psmith’s debut in the 1909 novel Mike, “the first moment when Wodehouse was touched by the sacred flame.”) Leave It to Psmith‘s copyright enters the public domain in 2019; HiLoBooks is pleased to serialize this terrific book here at HILOBROW. Enjoy!
‘Oh, I must go,’ said Eve, as she saw her. ‘I’m interrupting your business.’
‘I’m so glad you’re still here, dear,’ said Miss Clarkson. ‘I have just been looking over my files, and I see that there is one vacancy. For a nurse,’ said Miss Clarkson with a touch of the apologetic in her voice.
‘Oh, no, that’s all right,’ said Eve. ‘I don’t really need anything. But thanks ever so much for bothering.’
She smiled affectionately upon the proprietress, bestowed another smile upon Psmith as he opened the door for her, and went out. Psmith turned away from the door with a thoughtful look upon his face.
‘Is that young lady a nurse?’ he asked.
‘Do you want a nurse?’ inquired Miss Clarkson, at once the woman of business.
‘I want that nurse,’ said Psmith with conviction.
‘She is a delightful girl,’ said Miss Clarkson with enthusiasm. ‘There is no one in whom I would feel more confidence in recommending to a position. She is a Miss Halliday, the daughter of a very clever but erratic writer, who died some years ago. I can speak with particular knowledge of Miss Halliday, for I was for many years an assistant mistress at Wayland House, where she was at school. She is a charming, warm-hearted, impulsive girl…. But you will hardly want to hear all this.’
‘On the contrary,’ said Psmith, ‘I could listen for hours. You have stumbled upon my favourite subject.’
Miss Clarkson eyed him a little doubtfully, and decided that it would be best to reintroduce the business theme.
‘Perhaps, when you say you are looking for a nurse, you mean you need a hospital nurse?’
‘My friends have sometimes suggested it.’
‘Miss Halliday’s greatest experience has, of course, been as a governess.’
‘A governess is just as good,’ said Psmith agreeably.
Miss Clarkson began to be conscious of a sensation of being out of her depth.
‘How old are your children, sir?’ she asked.
‘I fear,’ said Psmith, ‘you are peeping into Volume Two. This romance has only just started.’
‘I am afraid,’ said Miss Clarkson, now completely fogged, ‘I do not quite understand. What exactly are you looking for?’
Psmith flicked a speck of fluff from his coat-sleeve.
‘A job,’ he said.
‘A job!’ echoed Miss Clarkson, her voice breaking in an amazed squeak.
Psmith raised his eyebrows.
‘You seem surprised. Isn’t this a job emporium?’
‘This is an Employment Bureau,’ admitted Miss Clarkson.
‘I knew it, I knew it,’ said Psmith. ‘Something seemed to tell me. Possibly it was the legend “Employment Bureau” over the door. And those framed testimonials would convince the most sceptical. Yes, Miss Clarkson, I want a job, and I feel somehow that you are the woman to find it for me. I have inserted an advertisement in the papers, expressing my readiness to undertake any form of employment, but I have since begun to wonder if after all this will lead to wealth and fame. At any rate, it is wise to attack the great world from another angle as well, so I come to you.’
‘But you must excuse me if I remark that this application of yours strikes me as most extraordinary.’
‘Why? I am young, active, and extremely broke.’
‘But your — er — your clothes…’
Psmith squinted, not without complacency, down a faultlessly fitting waistcoat, and flicked another speck of dust off his sleeve.
‘You consider me well dressed?’ he said. ‘You find me natty? Well, well, perhaps you are right, perhaps you are right. But consider. Miss Clarkson. If one expects to find employment in these days of strenuous competition, one must be neatly and decently clad. Employers look askance at a baggy trouser-leg, A zippy waistcoat is more to them than an honest heart. This beautiful crease was obtained with the aid of the mattress upon which I tossed feverishly last night in my attic room.’
‘I can’t take you seriously.’
‘Oh, don’t say that, please.’
‘You really want me to find you work?’
“I prefer the term “employment”.’
Miss Clarkson produced a notebook.
‘If you are really not making this application just as a joke…’
‘I assure you, no. Mv entire capital consists, in specie, of about ten pounds.’
‘Then perhaps you will tell me your name.’
‘Ah! Things are beginning to move. The name is Psmith. P-smith. The p is silent.’
‘Psmith?’
‘Psmith.’
Miss Clarkson over this this for a moment in almost pained silence, then recovered her slipping grip of affairs.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘you had better give me a few particulars about yourself.’
‘There is nothing I should like better,’ responded Psmith warmly. ‘I am always ready — I may say eager — to tell people the story of my life, but in this rushing age I get little encouragement. Let us start at the beginning. My infancy. When I was but a babe, my eldest sister was bribed with sixpence an hour by my nurse to keep an eye on me and see that I did not raise Cain. At the end of the first day she struck for a shilling, and got it. We now pass to my boyhood. At an early age I was sent to Eton. Everybody predicted a bright career for me. Those were very happy days, Miss Clarkson. A merry, laughing lad with curly hair and a sunny smile, it is not too much to say that I was the pet of the place. The old cloisters… But I am boring you. I can see it in your eye.’
‘No, no,’ protested Miss Clarkson. ‘But what I meant was… I thought you might have had some experience in some particular line of… In fact, what sort of work…?’
‘Employment.’
‘What sort of employment do you require?’
‘Broadly speaking,’ said Psmith, ‘any reasonably salaried position that has nothing to do with fish.’
‘Fish,’ quavered Miss Clarkson, slipping again. ‘Why fish?’
‘Because, Miss Clarkson, the fish trade was until this morning my walk in life, and my soul has sickened of it ’
‘You are in the fish trade?’ squeaked Miss Clarkson, with an amazed glance at the knife-like crease in his trousers.
‘These are not my working clothes,’ said Psmith, following and interpreting her glance. “Yes, owing to a financial upheaval in my branch of the family, I was until this morning at the beck and call of an uncle who unfortunately happens to be a Mackerel Monarch or a Sardine Sultan, or whatever these merchant princes are called who rule the fish market. He insisted on my going into the business to learn it from the bottom up, thinking, no doubt, that I would follow in his footsteps and eventually work my way to the position of a Whitebait Wizard. Alas! he was too sanguine. It was not to be,’ said Psmith solemnly, fixing an owl-like gaze on Miss Clarkson through his eye glass.
‘No?’ sai Miss Clarkson.
‘No. Last night I was obliged to inform him that the fish business was all right, but it wouldn’t do, and that I proposed to sever my connexion with the firm forever. I may say at once that there ensued something in the nature of a family earthquake. Hard words,’ sighed Psmith. ‘Black looks. unseemly wrangle. And the upshot of it all was that my uncle washed his hands of me and drove me forth into the great world. Hence my anxiety to find employment. My uncle has definitely withdrawn his countenance from me, Miss Clarkson.’
‘Dear, dear,’ murmured the proprietress sympathetically.
‘Yes. He is a hard man, and he judges his fellows solely by their devotion to fish. I never in my life met a man so wrapped up in a subject, For years he has been practically a monomaniac on the subject of fish. So much so that he actually looks like one. It is as if he had taken one of those auto-suggestion courses and had kept saying to himself, ‘Every day, in every way, I grow more and more like a fish.’ His closest friends can hardly tell now whether he more nearly resembles a halibut or a cod…. But I am boring you again with this family gossip?’
He eyed Miss Clarkson with such a sudden and penetrating glance that she started nervously.
‘No, no,’ she exclaimed.
‘You relieve my apprehensions. I am only too well aware that, when fairly launched on the topic of fish, I am more than apt to weary my audience. I cannot understand this enthusiasm for fish. My uncle used to talk about an unusually large catch of pilchards in Cornwall in much the same awed way as a right-minded curate would talk about the spiritual excellence of his bishop. To me. Miss Clarkson, from the very start, the fish business was what I can only describe as a wash-out. It nauseated my finer feelings. It got right in amongst my fibres. I had to rise and partake of a simple breakfast at about four in the morning, after which I would make my way to Billingsgate Market and stand for some hours knee-deep in dead fish of every description. A jolly life for a cat, no doubt, but a bit too thick for a Shropshire Psmith. Mine, Miss Clarkson, is a refined and poetic nature. I like to be surrounded by joy and life, and I know nothing more joyless and deader than a dead fish. Multiply that dead fish by a million, and you have an environment which only a Dante could contemplate with equanimity. My uncle used to tell me that the way to ascertain whether a fish was fresh was to peer into its eyes. Could I spend the springtime of life staring into the eyes of dead fish? No!’ He rose. ‘Well, I will not detain you any longer. Thank you for the unfailing courtesy and attention with which you have listened to me. You can understand now why my talents are on the market and why I am compelled to state specifically that no employment can be considered which has anything to do with fish. I am convinced that you will shortly have something particularly good to offer me.’
‘I don’t know that I can say that, Mr Psmith.’
‘The p is silent, as in pshrimp,’ he reminded her. ‘Oh, by the way,’ he said, pausing at the door, ‘there is one other thing before I go. While I was waiting for you to be disengaged, I chanced on an instalment of a serial story in The Girls’ Pet for January, 1919. My search for the remaining issues proved fruitless. The title was “Her Honour At Stake,” by Jane Emmeline Moss. You don’t happen to know how it all came out in the end, do you? Did Lord Eustace ever learn that, when he found Claire in Sir Jasper’s rooms at midnight, she had only gone there to recover some compromising letters for a girl friend? You don’t know? I feared as much. Well, good morning, Miss Clarkson, good morning. I leave my future in your hands with a light heart.’
‘I will do my best for you, of course.’
‘And what,’ said Psmith cordially, ‘could be better than Miss Clarkson’s best?’
He closed the door gently behind him, and went out. Struck by a kindly thought, he tapped upon Enquiries’ window, and beamed benevolently as her bobbed head shot into view.
‘They tell me,’ he said, ‘that Aspidistra is much fancied for the four o’clock race at Birmingham this afternoon. I give the information without prejudice, for what it is worth. Good day!’
* Psmith’s insistence that Miss Clarkson speak of employment rather than work marks him as a true idler.
SERIALIZED BY HILOBOOKS: Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague | Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail (and “As Easy as A.B.C.”) | Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt | H. Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook | Edward Shanks’ The People of the Ruins | William Hope Hodgson’s The Night Land | J.D. Beresford’s Goslings | E.V. Odle’s The Clockwork Man | Cicely Hamilton’s Theodore Savage | Muriel Jaeger’s The Man With Six Senses | Jack London’s “The Red One” | Philip Francis Nowlan’s Armageddon 2419 A.D. | Homer Eon Flint’s The Devolutionist | W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Comet” | Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Moon Men | Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland | Sax Rohmer’s “The Zayat Kiss” | Eimar O’Duffy’s King Goshawk and the Birds | Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince | Morley Roberts’s The Fugitives | Helen MacInnes’s The Unconquerable | Geoffrey Household’s Watcher in the Shadows | William Haggard’s The High Wire | Hammond Innes’s Air Bridge | James Branch Cabell’s Jurgen | John Buchan’s “No Man’s Land” | John Russell’s “The Fourth Man” | E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” | John Buchan’s Huntingtower | Arthur Conan Doyle’s When the World Screamed | Victor Bridges’ A Rogue By Compulsion | Jack London’s The Iron Heel | H. De Vere Stacpoole’s The Man Who Lost Himself | P.G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith | Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” | Houdini and Lovecraft’s “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs” | Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Sussex Vampire”.
RADIUM AGE SCIENCE FICTION: “Radium Age” is HILOBROW’s name for the 1904–33 era, which saw the discovery of radioactivity, the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. This era also saw the publication of genre-shattering writing by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sax Rohmer, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Jack London, Arthur Conan Doyle, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Karel Čapek, H.P. Lovecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Philip Gordon Wylie, and other pioneers of post-Verne/Wells, pre-Golden Age “science fiction.” More info here.
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